Everyone wants to feel fit and well. But all of us have one or another sort of health problems. As medicinal science is furthering towards better health advantages to humankind, so are increasing physical and mental diseases – heart diseases, obesity, arthritis, sexual problems, high cholesterol and the list can go on and on.

Most of these troubles are caused by our undisciplined style of living and insufficient physical activity. Lots of troubles may be treated by adjusting some kinds of easy exercises in your everyday life, bettering your nutrition habits and altering your diets. This is just how they come and go. Read the rest of this entry »

The Texas Rangers slugger Rafael Palmerio is 37 years old and he will not admit to having erection troubles. But he appears in ads promoting the ED drug. People started to wonder if he really suffers dysfunctions or if Pfizer, the company making this drug, wants to encourage young men to try it just for fun.

It’s true that penile dysfunction is more usual among older men, but lots of potential consumers are barely senior – around 40% of 40-year-old-males in the USA have certain degree of ED. Most of the today’s consumers are in early to middle 50s. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the entertainments in everyday life is to watch the endless cycles of urban myths. They start as whispers, slowly build in volume and then roar around the community for a few days or weeks until we all get bored. Then people start whispering a new myth. One of the more common themes is sex and, because we all like our stories to be slightly macabre, death and sex gets the biggest laughs. Have you heard the one about the man who died on top. The rigor mortis set in fast and, were it not for the weight pressing down on her, the woman said she’d never enjoyed an erection so hard and long-lasting. Such stories feed into all the fears and insecurities we have following a stroke or heart attack. Family and friends tell us to “take it easy” and not overexert ourselves. But the medical profession would not necessarily agree. It all depends on your physical condition. If you have been a couch potato, carry too much weight, have a high cholesterol level, are stressed and smoke, the risk of a second heart attack is high. But for the rest, exercise is good for you. It helps burn off the cholesterol, reduce the weight and restore your heart to a better working order. So how do you know which camp you fall into? Read the rest of this entry »

Drug-stores have recently seen some of the major selling products being removed from the market due to their potential damage to one’s health. As funny as it may sound – the drugs that are meant to cure you from one thing sometimes can totally destroy something else. Because of this lots of medications that were proven to be non-steroidal anti-inflammatory pills were left behind by the pharmacy holders. Not only do they have bad effects on the particular part of the body but they can also irritate skin and strongly harm the cells. Heart problems are not even considered side-effects there. These issues are just regular.

When you are about to choose a pain-killer, you have to not forget to be careful. When such cases are highlighted in the media one cannot help but start looking for an analogue of the pain-killer that would consist of natural ingredients. It is true that chemical pain-killers aren’t good enough for everyone. When any type of danger is involved people prefer to turn around and leave. We will not deny that some illnesses and health problems can be treated with the interaction of natural solutions and substances but when it comes to chronic pain there is one question hanging off the wall – can natural solutions cure chronic pain? Read the rest of this entry »

When it was first introduced into the market, the advertisers promoted their products through celebrity endorsements with Sir Walter Raleigh and Philip of Spain working tirelessly to popularise smoking and enhance their personal profits. Although many attempts were made to ban the use of tobacco in various countries around the world, we had to wait until the last century for real progress to be made. The decision whether to use any drug is always a balancing of the benefits against the costs. In the case of tobacco, smoking releases a batch of chemicals producing a pleasurable response sufficiently strong to be addictive. People are hooked quite quickly and find the unpleasantness of the withdrawal symptoms a deterrent to quitting. But, despite the best efforts of the tobacco industry to hide the medical evidence, we now understand the physical dangers of smoking. The link with cancer and heart disease is undeniable. This information now deters many young people from starting to smoke and encourages existing smokers to endure the withdrawal symptoms to quit. Curiously, less is made of the link between smoking and erectile dysfunction. Perhaps it is considered too personal an attack on lifestyle choices. Just as some will resist calls to moderate the amount of alcohol drunk despite the risk of liver disease, others will deny the need to quit smoking unless their lives are directly at risk. Read the rest of this entry »

Every day you pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV, you cannot avoid seeing ads for a range of drugs including sleeping pills. It seems like the pharmaceutical industry still has money to burn even though we are going through a recession. What’s going on? Well, it’s all to do with building up and then maintaining the brand. Marketing has become increasingly scientific. Focus groups are brought together and polled on what features for a product are the most important, how much we would pay for it, what we think about this slogan for selling it, and so on. The intention is to design an advertising campaign that will tell us what we most want to know about a product, explain why it’s great value for money, and so on, all in the most memorable of prose and, on TV, backed up by the latest music from a top singer or group. That way, when we do fall ill, we can walk in to see our physician and ask for the drug we want by name. Except, we are all likely to forget a product’s name. So the marketers endlessly repeat it wherever we go to reinforce brand awareness. Like Pavlov’s dog who was taught to react when a bell rang, we are taught to respond with the leading brand name whenever a product type is mentioned. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems the imagination of the folk who work for TV corporations is limited to the same basic formula. Reality shows are big business. If you want to earn the maximum revenue from selling ad space on TV, have a group of regular people running round the world doing silly things in a search for one million dollars or follow a group of families as they compete against each other to see who can lose the most weight. In these shows, the biggest losers are the winners. These are the people who, for some reason, catch the imagination of the public. They become fan favorites and find their public lives transformed with fans approaching them as they walk down Main Street. Actually, for weight loss, this can be a big plus because fans can embarrass people into keeping to a diet. Imagine how a participant in a weight loss show would feel if everyone pointed them out as they bought another donut. This would be a sure-fire way of motivating them to eat only healthy food.
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There is a wonderful idiom, several times used as the title to a movie and offering the comparative warning, “It shouldn’t happen to a dog.” It refers to some proposed act or omission that is so unpleasant to humans, it should not even be wished on a dog (being a mere animal, it might be expected to bear most things, but not this). Human culture has grown up with animals a part of our lives. Whether as pets, living as one of the family in our own homes, or as working beasts, we value them for “who” they are and what they can do for us. This means treating them in much the same way as humans. If they get sick, we give them our medications. Sometimes, they retaliate by acting as incubators to encourage viruses to mutate and, as with “swine” or “bird” flu, return the favor by passing us infections to which we have no resistance. But, in general, we worry about them. Even the animals we propose to eat are stuffed full of antibiotics to keep them fit and healthy. So, keeping this real, there are many protections we have put in place for our animals. The most carefully monitored rules affect horses. These powerful animals have become a key part of the gambling industry, running in races for our excitement and jumping fences for our admiration. Read the rest of this entry »

Once formed, habits are difficult to break. It always just seems easier to go on as you have before. This can become a serious problem when science gets in the way of the habits. If you look at the world of adverts in print and the media, you will see opioids recommended as the sure-fire drugs to use as painkillers, no matter what the pain. It carries on in the venerable tradition of the slogan, “Beecham’s Pills cure all ills”. The idea of a panacea – one pill to rule them all, as The Dark Lord of Mordor might have said – has been around since the beginning of time. This is fair game for the marketers to use when talking to the public, but the same thinking has entered the training manuals for the medical profession. Sit in lectures for student doctors and you will hear the same story that opioids are the first line of defense when it comes to moderate to severe pain. Once you have the source of the prescriptions in on the group think, the habit is almost impossible to break. Read the rest of this entry »

Male impotence or, as the doctors call it, erectile dysfunction (ED) is a constant or periodical inability to obtain or maintain an erection strong enough for having sexual intercourse. And as the overall satisfaction with sexual life is a very important aspect of an individual’s wellbeing, seeing the rise in erectile dysfunction and female sexual problems within the aging population becomes disturbing. That’s why the question of successfully treating erectile dysfunction becomes more and more relevant for a constantly growing group of people, bringing satisfaction and preventing from psychological problems from taking place in case it helps. Read the rest of this entry »